Screenhead

No song and dance man — Hugh Jackman will not host the Oscars a second year in a row.  

The actor, who’s starring on Broadway with Daniel Craig in the drama “A Steady Rain,” quietly turned down the job sometime during the past few weeks.

I liked Jackman as the song and dance man of the Oscars. He drew praise from others as well. He says he’ll host the Oscar show again in the future, but is not certain.

After his Broadway run, Jackman plans to take time off and prepare for The Real Steel, the Shawn Levy-directed DreamWorks drama that starts production in the spring.

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The idea of putting Hugh Jackman in a role featuring enormous battling robots  is an idea that makes me question if my medication is sufficiently strong, but then I read about it in a few movie websites–including right here–and suddenly things start to make sense.

But it’s true–the movie’s called Real Steel, and it assumes a future in which boxing is declared illegal as it’s too dangerous.  Thus, it’s replaced by letting one-ton fighting robots take over.  Jackman will discover a model previously thought obsolete that has the strangest habit of actually winning.

It’s kind of an awesome thought, with Jackman playing the Doc Lewis to the robot’s Little Mac, even if it’s got that vaguely familiar / derivative feeling to it  thanks to previous attempts at making a Robot Fight Club like Rock ‘em Sock’em Robots, the old Virtual Boy game Teleroboxer, or even the really apt description of a weird hybrid of Rocky meets Robot Jox

I’ll admit though, this has the great potential to be a charming, hilarious and action-packed title when and if they finally figure out just what all they’re going to do with it.  They won’t even start filming this until at least summer 2010, so forget about catching this one before 2011.

Hugh Jackman is setting his sights on Real Steel for DreamWorks with Shawn Levy to direct. Levy has quite a list of films under his belt: Big Fat Liar, The Pink Panther, and Night at the Museum and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

Real Steal is kind of like a retired Rocky meets 2000-pound human type robot.   Jackman would play an ex-fighter, who becomes a Robot Boxing promoter, but whose chances of success are hampered by his access to sub-standard robot parts. That is until he discovers a discarded robot that always seems to win. The ex-fighter has also discovered he’s the father of a 13-year old son, and they bond as the robot brawls its way toward the top.  

The studio would like to see a production start date in May 2010.

The idea of the movie came from a short story by Richard Matheson. If anyone knows Spielberg’s history of film, Matheson wrote Spielberg’s directing debut, the television movie Duel, and he was story editor on Spielberg’s Amazing Stories.

Matheson authored the book I am Legend, which was made into three movies. The last one starring Will Smtih with the same title. Matheson’s recent writing associations in the film business includes these movies: The Box, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Countdown.

Hugh Jackman is attached to play American showman P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman on Earth, an original contemporary musical to be penned by Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City).

Jackman will play the showman with a penchant for hoaxing a gullible public as he creates the three-ring circus that made him famous. The musical also focuses on his infatuation with singer Jenny Lind — the so-called Swedish Nightingale.

The movie will carry a contemporary musical score, and the studio is in talks with British singer-songwriter Mika to write music and lyrics.  I can hear the melodies now!

The musical follows the old Hollywood tradition wherein musicals were scripted with specific actors in mind. The Lind role is being scripted for Anne Hathaway, who held her own with Jackman in his opening Oscar’s number.

Jackman has a penchant to bring musicals back to the big screen. The Greatest Show on Earth adds another to the properties he is developing.  Another one of those properties is a David Magee-scripted Carousel remake wherein Jackman also wants Hathaway as his female lead in the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic.

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Money talks when it comes to a comedy pitch worth buying.  20th Century Fox has acquired Avon Man a comedy pitched from Kevin Bisch who wrote Hitch.  Avon Man is a star vehicle for Hugh Jackman.  Sounds great, I’d buy Avon products from Mr. Jackman, any time.

The comedy follows men who are laid off from an auto dealership. One car salesman, Jackman, is reluctantly recruited into becoming an Avon salesman, and while the experience is initially emasculating, he uses his charm and good looks to become a top seller.  

The comedy takes on a Full Monty theme when the former car salesman sets out to save his financially strapped family and town by recruiting his buddies into the makeup business to win a regional contest.  

“Ding-Dong, Avon calling.”

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Hyde Park Entertainment has successfully lassoed in Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson to make them star in the period drama Unbound Captives.

The film will mark the directorial debut for actress Madeleine Stowe who also penned it. It follows a woman (Weisz) whose husband is killed and her two children kidnapped by a Comanche war party in 1859. She is rescued by a frontiersman (Jackman), while Pattison is set to play the son.

Stowe and her husband actor Brian Benben penned the script under the pseudonym O.C. Humphrey back in the early ‘90s. Shooting starts at the end of the year.

With Wolverine turning out to be bankable, it clearly proves that Hugh Jackman is a box office stud. His company, Seeds Productions,  is lining up several projects to keep him producing like a box office stud.

First, Personal Security is a spec script by Matt Lieberman. Jackman will star as a tough Gotham police detective coerced into bodyguard duty for a spoiled teen heiress who is receiving kidnapping threats.

Second, Jackman is spinning over Drive,an adaptation of the James Sallis novel, playing a lonely who drives race cars by day and getaway cars by night in Los Angeles.  Rumors are that Jackman is energized by the latest draft that captures the tone of a Steve McQueen film.

Third, according to Variety, a long development project Carouselis now a priority.  A rewrite emerged as a timeless spirit of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic while bringing in relevance for a contemporary audience. Jackman will play Billy Bigelow in hopes that the role of Julie Jordan is played Anne Hathaway. Both performed a duet in the Oscarcast opening number.  Nothing official has begun with the actress.

Lastly, Jackman, who won a Tony for The Boy From Oz, hopes to return to the Broadway stage in early 2010 performing the title role in Houdini.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine just clawed its way through the box office and now star, Hugh Jackman, is attached to Ghostopolis.  The film is based on an upcoming graphic novel from Doug TenNapel that the author recently set up at Disney. 

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the story follows a man who works for the government’s Supernatural Immigration Task Force. His job is to send ghosts who have escaped into our world back to Ghostopolis. When a living boy accidentally is sent to the other side, the agent must team with a female ghost (and former flame) to bring him back.

TenNapel’s graphic novels are hot commodities as movie projects, with nearly all of them in different development stages at studios.